Jurors in the Ashley Smith inquest viewed dramatic video Tuesday showing the teen being strapped into a chair at a women’s prison in Nova Scotia.

Jurors at the Ashley Smith inquest were shown dramatic video on Tuesday of the teen being strapped into a chair at a women's prison in Nova Scotia because she was banging her head against the floor and wall in her cell.

Jurors in the Ashley Smith inquest viewed dramatic video Tuesday showing the teen being strapped into a chair at a women’s prison in Nova Scotia because she was banging her head against the floor and wall in her cell.

Guards at a Nova Scotia prison used “extraordinary force” when they strapped Ashley Smith in a specially designed restraining chair for eight hours in 2007 for banging her head on the floor of her cell, says the lawyer for the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

Jurors at the inquest into Smith’s October 2007 death viewed dramatic video Tuesday showing the teen being strapped into a chair at the Nova Institution because she was harming herself in her segregation cell.

“It’s an extraordinary deprivation of her liberty. She was in that chair for eight hours strapped in like that. It’s an extraordinary use of force on someone who was essentially compliant with them,” Breese Davies said in an interview outside the inquest.

“There doesn’t seem to have been any effort to take measures to de-escalate the situation with her,” Davies said.

The video shows six specially trained emergency response guards in black suits and visors on their helmets entering Smith’s cell Aug. 23, 2007. When they enter, four other regular guards from the jail are already waiting in her cell wearing hazardous materials suits.

The guards are dressed in the suits because Smith had in the past smeared feces in her cell, and thrown urine and feces through a food slot on her segregation door, the inquest heard.

On the video the guards in the suits already have Smith pinned face down on the floor of her cell, with her head on a pillow. Her hands are cuffed behind her back and her legs are shackled.

The emergency response guards then take Ashley and strap her into the chair.

Alfred Legere, the warden at Nova Institution prison for women in Truro, N.S., where Smith was being held at the time, told the inquest this week that the chair was used because he feared Smith might kill herself by banging her head. She was bleeding from her head as a result of this activity, Legere said Tuesday.

“Ashley was self-mutilating . . . There was blood on the floor in the cell. I had no other option but put her in a (restraining) chair for her protection,” Legere told the inquest.

Legere testified that it was the first time he used the chair in the institution, and that he was uncomfortable with the concept of tying someone in it.

The jail can’t medicate prisoners without their consent.

While she was in the chair, Smith was monitored by medical personnel, Legere said.

After those hours passed, Smith “calmed down” and asked to be released so she could go to sleep, Legere said.

“Did the chair work?” asked coroner’s counsel Jocelyn Speyer.

“Yes,” replied Legere.

The head banging episode and chair restraint happened shortly after another inmate in Nova’s segregation range took a guard hostage. Smith witnessed the incident.

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